BARCELONA  Microsoft on Monday launched its Windows Phone 7 Series, the most radical change that Microsoft smartphones have ever seen. WP7  there's no "Windows Mobile" any more  uses a bold array of tiles and pivoting panels to let users easily access their personal information, Zune music and Xbox Live gamer card.

WP7 phones will come from Dell, Garmin-Asus, HTC, HP, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba, Microsoft said at the Mobile World Conference here. Carriers will include all of the U.S.'s Big Four  AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon  as well as Deutsche Telekom, Orange, SFR, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Telstra, and Vodafone.

"Windows Mobile is dead," said Aaron Woodman, director of the Mobile Communications Business for Microsoft's Consumer Experiences Product Management team.

But it's a long road before WP7 hits shelves. The first phones will appear for the 2010 holiday season, Woodman said.

A brand new interface

WP7 looks like nothing you've ever seen before from Microsoft. All the ancillary gewgaws  the Start Menu, the soft keys, the home screen as you know it  are gone. The main WP7 user interface is a bold array of five "live tiles," boxes containing text and photos: Internet Explorer, Phone, Text, People, Pictures and Multimedia (Zune). Alerts appear within the tiles themselves  if you have unanswered calls, the number appears within the phone tile. Your most recent pictures fade into the Pictures tile, and so on. If you click on the Multimedia tile, your phone turns into a Zune, but it isn't a "Zune phone." Zune is just one app.

"It's content, not chrome. We really used the idea of fierce reduction" in the interface, said Albert Shum, the lead interface designer.

Scroll down to find more big, live tiles: Calendar, Exchange, Windows Live, Me and Xbox Live. Scroll right to find the list of all apps on your phone.

The same interface theme of big, bold words, large square pictures and sliding tiles appears in individual apps. Search Bing and you can "pivot" between modes for local and business search using large words across the top. Head into your contacts list, and you slide between large tiles representing your favorite people and a scrolling list of your contacts with their social-networking updates.

The new Web browser is based on Internet Explorer, and includes pinch-to-zoom and automatic column reformatting. It doesn't have Adobe Flash, and Flash probably won't be available at launch, Woodman said. An "Office Hub" will provide full Microsoft Office support, Woodman said.

Partners such as HTC will no longer be able to "re-skin" phones with their own user interfaces. Instead, their energies should be drawn to "hubs," or tiles in the standard Microsoft interface that could then expand into app-like experiences, Woodman said.

Microsoft is also throwing out ActiveSync and Windows Mobile Device Center. You'll now sync with a new version of the Zune software. And yes, that means no Mac support for now.

Hands-on and hardware

I received a few minutes with a Windows Phone 7 Series prototype today, and the software looked beautiful but felt very, very early. Tiles responded sluggishly. When I scrolled down a contact list, it scrolled into a great black abyss that only filled with contacts after a few seconds. That wasn't what Microsoft showed in its demo, of course  and remember, this software is ten months from launch.

On the other hand, if it actually performs properly, WP7 has the intangibles that Microsoft phones have lacked for years. It's fun to explore. The interface makes sense. It's easy to find the things you need. Nothing is buried. It uses the power of a mobile computer to put important information at the fore  possibly even more immediately than the iPhone.

Microsoft stayed coy about the hardware requirements, saying that more would come out at the MIX developer conference in mid-March. But it's pretty obvious that old Windows Mobile software won't run on this phone, as the user interfaces have zero in common. Microsoft also said Qualcomm would supply chipsets for the first set of WP7 phones, while specifically neglecting to mention Nvidia.

All WP7 phones will have five hardware buttons: back, home, search, camera, and power. The prototype I saw had a capacitive touch screen, both front and rear facing camera, and no QWERTY keyboard. Microsoft said that the company will allow OEMs to design their own slide-out QWERTY keyboards  though BlackBerry-like candybar-style phones with keyboards are a no-go.

"The phones will be owned by OEMs, and you'll see different form factors and choices," Woodman said.

Microsoft also left multitasking a mystery, saying only that "music will play in the background." Once again, there are more details to come at MIX.

Windows Phone 7 is pretty amazing. But it still has ten months before launch  and we're going to see a bunch of competing upgrades between now and then. With iPhone 4, Symbian^3 and who-knows-what from Google appearing this summer and fall, the question isn't whether WP7 is amazing for February 2010. It's whether it will still be amazing in December.

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts of the daily PCMag Live Web show and speaks frequently in mass media on cell-phone-related issues. His commentary has appeared on ABC, the BBC, the CBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and in newspapers from San Antonio, Texas to Edmonton, Alberta.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer, having contributed...
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